Category Archives: Linguistic Tutorials

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Lexical items = (the words) make up the lexicon. To be a lexical item it has to be part of your lexicon, your dialect. It has to be something in use and understandable. (Note, not all lexemes are lexical items – people understand made up words because of the grammar rules outside of the conversation, so if I said ‘I will redify that wall with paint’ you will know I mean I will turn that wall red).

Progressive Participle = -ing, in the state of doing something

Perfect Participle = -ed, -en (past tense)

Morphology = the study of word forms

Affix = Something that is added to a word such as a prefix or a suffix

Prefix = Before – DEvalue, DEform

Suffix = After – devaluED, deformED

Inflectional Morpheme = catS, workED – it adds the word to a different syntactical category whether it makes it plural or past. It does not change the lexeme.

Derivational Morpheme = drinkABLE, NONsense, classIFY – it does change the lexeme. For example in ‘classify’ it changes the noun, class into a verb, to classify.

Infinitive = the form of the verb which does not show any syntactic category

Agreement = when the verb agrees with the subject, in terms of person and number. For example – I work, she works

The Head = WORK is the head of the verb WORKed as it is the more dominant bit of the word

Phonology

– Phones = the basic sounds that make up all human languages

– Phonemes = the sub-set of phones that function within a specific language

– Phonetic Alphabet = Designed to represent PHONES. Made up of phonetic symbols

– Mental Grammar = internal linguistic knowledge, is subconscious and is not a result of any teaching.

– Linguistic Etiquette = ‘proper’ or ‘best’ structures to be used in a language (prescriptive grammar). A few examples of prescriptive grammar are= do not split the infinitve, say it ‘was’ good instead of ‘were’ good.

– The Structure of Expressions = involves the study and analysis of the structures found in a language, usually with the aim of establishing a description of the grammar of English (descriptive grammar).

– Lexeme = can be realised through many different word forms. For example ‘try’ is a lexeme but it can take several forms such as ‘tries’, ‘tried’ and ‘trying’.

– Count noun = if the word is ‘a…’, ‘the…’, plural. E.g. cat (because you can have A cat, THE cat and catS).

– Non count noun = if the word only appears in one group shown above for example ‘information’ – you can have THE information but you can’t say A information or informationS.

– Inflection = a change in the form of a word to express grammatical functions for example cat+S= cats. The inflection is the –s.

– A stem = this is the portion of the word which does not change regardless of tense or agreement so as shown above it would be the ‘cat’ in ‘cats’.

– A free morpheme = can stand alone e.g. move, nation, low.

– A bound morpheme = cannot stand alone e.g. –ment, -al, –ly.

– A gradable adjective = shows that something has different degrees e.g. VERY cold, A BIT cold.

– A non- gradable adjective = ‘married’ because you cannot be ‘very married’.

Descriptive Grammars

– Descriptive grammars attempt to model the intuitions we have about the structure of our native language.

– Native speakers know how to order words to make sentences.

– Intuitions about structure are not based on a knowledge of which words follow others nut on a tacit knowledge that words belong to different syntactic or grammatical categories (e.g. noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, determiner, conjunction).

– To account for how we intuitively know which words belong to which syntactic categories, linguists use criteria that arise from the study of word-formation (morphology) and from the study of sentences (syntax).